


Of Earth and Broken Things

by spectreshepard



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Ash and Kaidan are the best friends ya'll can ask for, Biotic Shepard, F/M, PTSD Shepard is inevitable, Platonic Relationships, Renegade Commander Shepard, Renegade hearts weren't made for this, post-destroy, slightly canon divergent -- Virmire can gtfo, slow rebuilding, that includes Shepard, variation on MEHEM
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-24
Updated: 2017-01-27
Packaged: 2018-09-19 16:49:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9450962
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spectreshepard/pseuds/spectreshepard
Summary: Immediately after firing the Crucible, the Normandy fails to outrun the blast and is grounded just outside of London. In a desperate bid to find their lost Commander and restore order, the crew must deal with the grim reality of a life immediately post-war. The sun will always rise again, but for people stumbling in the dark, the blinding prospect of hope is dangerous.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Well, here it is! My first foray into multi-chapter fic verse, and it's exciting! I hope I'll be able to deliver the story of my Shepard to you guys, and diolch for taking the time to read this.

> _They pulled him from the wreckage. It was far from glorious, not even close to a hero’s welcome, or even an end. They’d seen the N7 mark on his burnt out armour, the only thing identifying this body from the next ugly mess along the rubble. There had been no word for the silence that hung over the Normandy like a funeral wreath when they flew the shuttle back into the hangar bay, no balm for the way hope now burned like frostbite instead of a welcome hearth._
> 
> _Nothing but the wait, and it was insufferable._

Ashley groans, shifting on the cot in the medbay. There’s a subtle ache gnawing at her skin, sitting along ugly lines of bruises and heavy bones. It pushes and pulls at the memory fragments shifting in her brain, until she remembers running. She remembers the chill of the night setting in, cool against the sticky warmth of blood in places she couldn’t recall. Her face feels warm, an imprint of memory, of Shepard’s hand at her cheek - his thumb brushing away the dirt and the tears she refused to cry. But everything else… everything else is so _cold_. And it’s the wrong kind of cold, damn it. It wasn’t _his_ hands thrumming with biotics, or her back against the cold glass on shore leave. No gentle warmth to bring her back, and nothing to find purchase on.

Her hands slip off the metal cot when she stirs. It feels like falling in a dream.

“Lieutenant?” A bodiless voice, but soft; nothing at all like the hard lights overhead, “Ashley?”

She blinks, once, then twice. Somewhere between the third and fifth, she finds the voice. Chakwas, grey and concerned, blocks the hard lights from Ashley’s sight for a moment as she swims into clarity.

“Ashley, glad to see you’re back with us.” Chakwas manages a tight smile, concern playing at her heavily lined eyes, sleepless and laden with doubt. Ash takes a moment longer to register her words fully, but she forces out a heavy breath in the meantime, and it burns her lungs.

“God. How bad?” She licks her lips, throat dry as a bone. Her words take her straight to her point, but Ashley finds it difficult to steer her worry to safer shores. This isn’t the first time she’s been injured on duty, but… it feels different. Chakwas is clearly rattled, even if her hands are steady as they always were, hovering over Ash with her omnitool depicting various scans and diagnostics between them.

“You’ve been out for a little while, Ashley. We’re still in the Sol system.” Chakwas doesn’t miss the unspoken question from the lieutenant, and she continues without missing a beat as the holo lights flicker across her tired face.

“The blast from the truck left both you and Major Alenko with multiple lacerations and severe bruising. He did say you’d been much closer to the truck than he was, which explains your more extensive injuries.”

“Cheerful.” Ash huffs, but Chakwas recognizes the tone of her dry humour and smiles gently despite her worry. The omnitool interface disappears with a quiet hum as Chakwas lowers her arm to fix Ashley with her orders, firm and fair as she ever is.

“Painkillers and bed rest,” Chakwas determines simply, her matter-of-fact nature always managing to put Ash at ease somehow, “For anyone else, I’d say two weeks at least. I doubt I could push you for _one_.”

“You could try, Doc.” Ash retorts, voice stronger now. Chakwas chuckles drily, and disappears for a moment. Ashley gingerly lifts her head to follow her footsteps. It doesn’t hurt as much as she expects, and she feels… light. A cursory glance of the room finds the bulk of her armour in a heap on the medbay floor, covered in dents and bloodied messes of what she can only presume had been Reapers. Her underarmour shirt is torn where talons found the weak points of her hardsuit, but it’s hardly anything to flap about. She’s just grateful to be alive. She’s just grateful to be back on the Normandy, with her friends and crewmates and Shepard–

With Shepard.

He was groundside. They’d left him.

The cold comes back in a tidal wave, crashing over her shoulders. It seizes her breath, makes her gasp for air as her body shudders, hands curling around the edges of the metal cot as she tries to hold onto her rapidly disappearing ground. No, this couldn’t be happening–

He was on Earth, alone, firing the Crucible. Alone. Alone. Alone. _Why couldn’t he just let her go with him?_ The cold seeps into her fingertips, locking them to the metal of the bed. She wants to scream, her chest constricting with the effort of holding her fears, but it comes out in a noiseless sob instead. She screws her eyes shut, clamping her lips together to stop the cold from spilling out as her stomach lurches and tightens into a knot, shaped so callously like fear.

Ashley imagines a life without him. She doesn’t want to, but she does. She reaches for him at every turn, and every turn is met with an empty hand and a whisper on the wind that she never quite hears. A gentle breeze across her mother’s windowsill as she tries to laugh with her sisters, the winter chill kept at bay because of him. A familiar smile on Kaidan’s face that hurts and heals in equal measure for a reason she can never quite place. He would be part of everything, everywhere she went, and always, always just out of reach.

Just out of reach, the way he’d slipped from her grip on Earth. The way he’d smiled at her, bright eyes and laughter lines hardly obscured by the blood and dirt on his face. The promise, the confession, the final deliverance of a man who’d spent three years waiting. He loved her.

He loved her.

Ashley doesn’t bother to stop the sob that slips past her lips this time.

“Ashley?” Chakwas is there again, but far out of focus when Ashley tries to open her eyes. She feels a gentle hand on her shoulder, squeezing gently to try and coax her up. Another hand finds Ashley’s own, fingers clasped to the table with an iron grip that Chakwas slowly prises apart. Ashley relents, breaths shuddering as she sits up slowly, words beyond her.

“I’m going to get Kaidan, is that okay?” Chakwas speaks clearly. Still gentle, but firm – she needed an answer. Ashley nods. It’s all she can do.

Chakwas is gone for a brief moment before she returns, and Ash barely regains enough composure to notice the medbay doors whirring open. She doesn’t look up to greet the second pair of footsteps, keeping her eyes fixed on a lone tile on the floor instead.

She can hear murmuring voices, but pays no heed to the words they shape. She had grieved Shepard once. She hadn’t counted on having to do it again.

The smell of ozone and raindrops on metal is hard to misplace. Ashley sniffs, blinking as hard as she can before she lets out a sigh. Grief ghosts over her lips, but Kaidan doesn’t miss a thing. Damn sentinel.

“Ashley.” His voice is warm, but not the kind of warm she wants. She wants Shepard. She says nothing.

“We haven’t heard anything–” Kaidan starts again, but Ashley looks up at him this time. Kaidan is stopped in his tracks by her red-rimmed eyes, so unfamiliar and out of place on her. He’s used to eyes with a familiar spark, a quirk to her words, a hidden smile behind every quip. But there was nothing hidden about her now, and it pulled so strangely at Kaidan to see her bare the bones of her grief.

“Of course we haven’t.” Ashley snaps, and Kaidan falters, lips falling closed with a gentleness upon them that Ashley needed, but refused to take. She was always so stubborn.

Kaidan glances down at her clasped hands, covering them with his own in one purposeful movement. He knows he’s not Shepard, he knows that Ashley is hurting, and he knows that she’ll be beating herself up about this until kingdom come. But he has to try.

“Ash, we can’t rule anything out.” He says, thumb rubbing gently over her wrist as he feels how cold she is. Her expression remains unchanged, but her hands move under his own until he feels her fingers clasp tightly around his palm. He swallows the hurt and smiles, he knows it’s stretched thin and useless, but he hopes it will do something.

“Can’t rule anything in, either, LT.” Ash murmurs eventually, her voice hoarse. He smiles at the use of ‘LT’, though. She never really stopped calling him that. Kaidan likes to think it’s a memory of easier times that she holds onto; he knows she’s sentimental.

Kaidan watches her for a moment, trying to figure out where to go. She almost seems to swallow her words, mouth opening just slightly with intent, and then closing again with a sideways glance. He waits, regardless. He’d always wait.

“Didn’t you get hurt, Kai?” Ash manages, eventually. He finds concern in her dark eyes, and he watches as she shifts on the bed again, hands still clasped firmly around his own. Kaidan loses a moment to thought, recalling the burn of his shoulders as he’d helped Ash back from the wreckage of overturned trucks. Shepard had pleaded with him to take her, and he remembers his friend’s voice so clearly. He tries to ignore the thought that questions whether he’ll hear it again.

“Not as bad as you, Ash. Just a bit of bruising. Surface stuff.” He replies, squeezing her hands reassuringly. Ash nods, her breathing slow and steady again as she tries to put herself back together again.

“You don’t need to put on a front for me, LC.” Kaidan says gently, the nickname filling the spaces between them with a familiarity they needed. Ash smiles, but it’s empty and lined with grief, not comfort.

“For myself, at least.” She retorts, but Kaidan shakes his head. There was grief of his own, threatening to claw at his chest and break out through his mouth if he let them both be swept away by it. He had a gut feeling, somehow, somewhere, Shepard was waiting. He wouldn’t give Ash false hope, but if he kept it, it would be enough for them.

“You’re allowed this, Ash. _You’re allowed this._ Don’t tell yourself you aren’t, because–” Kaidan’s words stutter and fail, betraying his own fears. He sighs heavily, feeling Ash’s eyes on him as he glances away for a moment, anywhere but her.

A weight settles on his chest, achingly familiar, and he finds Ash’s dark waves bunched up against his shirt as she leans against him, exhausted. He removes a hand from hers to brush the hair from her face gently, letting her take refuge. She could stay as long as she needed. Kaidan had enough hope for the both of them.

_“Shuttle onboard, requesting immediate assistance–_ ” A disjointed voice spits out a sentence over the comm system. The knowledge of total uncertainty was a difficult verge to cross, but Kaidan and Ashley both look up at the voice, hearts somewhere in between hope and bone-chilling fear.

“ _Immediate medical assistance!–_ ” the comm crackles again, and Chakwas appears at the doors again. She barely says a word as she gathers an emergency medkit in a flurry of movement, before she descends in the elevator to the shuttle bay.

To Shepard.


	2. Chapter 2

 

Chakwas is the first to realise just how grim the air has turned in the hangar. It’s heavy and cold from the chill draw as the bay door closes and the shuttle whirs to a halt. There’s a dull, metallic thud as it lands. She exits the elevator, the doors sliding shut behind her with a familiar resonant hum.

“Holy _shit_.” Vega, still in full gear, wastes no time dropping his rifle on the bench to cross the hangar, red lights flickering from the shuttle as the hatch opens and panicked chatter follows close behind. Chakwas breaks into a run to reach him, a quiet fear sitting tightly in her chest. She’d lost soldiers before. Good ones. Friends. Those were wounds that healed over time, made skin weave back stronger, made each smile brighter in their memory. Those were names she’d never forget, but would be surprised to hear anyone else say. A quiet familiarity, shared only between the happy few.

But Shepard? No. Losing Shepard would be irreparable. His name is a prelude to salvation for the many, a rallying cry for too many people who would follow nobody else. It had become too important, too intertwined with the idea of a victory that they could grasp in the face of a certain end. Chakwas knows it, and she knows the fallout of that alone will be worse than anything the Reapers could have done.

The smell of blood and burnt skin is vile, overwhelming, and all too real as she draws near. She almost runs into Vega when she reaches the shuttle hatch where he stands rock still, just outside. With a hand on his shoulder, she gently tells him to give them space, and he fumbles for a reply as he steps back to let her through properly. Chakwas doesn’t need her years of experience to understand Vega’s disbelief. Nobody wants to believe in the inevitable mortality of a man who played Lazarus.

She steps further in, eyes drawn immediately to the body on the floor. It’s Shepard, alright, but it’s the Shepard she never wanted to see. It takes every bit of courage to look at his face  – what she can see of it – and survey the damage. And there’s a _lot_.

Shepard’s eyes are closed, Chakwas had expected as much. For a moment, he looks peaceful.

Just for a moment.

Kneeling beside him, Chakwas is careful not to touch his badly burnt and torn shoulder. It was a struggle to discern skin from armour, blackened burns and dried blood concealing any image of humanity left on Shepard’s side. Swallowing heavily, she gently tries to lift an armour plate, but stops as soon as she feels the skin _tear_. Her stomach lurches, and she glances up for a moment to take a breath and find her unshakeable resolve.

Skilled hands find the catch on the plate, and she loosens it enough to get a look at the damage underneath. It would leave scars, no doubt, but it isn’t as bad as it looks on the surface. His skin is intact, if badly burnt. That’s _something_ , she considers. Setting the plate back onto his shoulder, she examines the burnt out armour across his chest and sternum. The glint of his dogtags give away the stuttering rise and fall of his chest as he clings onto life, and Chakwas silently thanks the stars for allowing them this.

Keen eyes find their way back to Shepard’s face, half torn and burnt and caught in a grimace. The curl of his lip is marred by talon marks, closely resembling a husk attack, and she almost winces.

Chakwas sits back, swallowing doubt and willing her mind to do what it does best. And she really tries, but _God_ , all she can see is his smile through the medbay window when she caught him and Ashley laughing together in the mess, barely two days ago.

She sees the way he would raise an eyebrow and pop that ridiculous, crooked grin whenever he'd listened to Mordin's rambles, and shot a look her way that always had her coughing to cover up her laughter.

She sees every bright-eyed, lionhearted speech he shared with Garrus, every look of genuine interest he had when he spoke to Tali about Rannoch. The tired yawns and nudges across the table to James and Steve when he coaxed them onto a coffee break.

Chakwas could see nothing but his unforgivable humanity, and the Reapers had tried their best to take it from him. A quiet fury burns in her gut, but she quells it as quickly as it springs, calling for steady hands and a steadier heart to do what needed to be done.

A permeating silence makes its way through the shuttle, and Chakwas allows it to surround her while she steers her thoughts to bringing the Commander back. It would be a long, long road to recovery, and not just physically. _No sense in running backwards_ , she thinks, _let’s start from the beginning._ So she straightens up, gathers herself back to her feet, and begins to get to work.

“Doc? Can I do anything?” Vega’s low rumble breaks the eerie silence in the shuttle, and it’s hard to ignore the desperate edge to his usually chipper tone. Chakwas looks over her shoulder to smile faintly in his direction, shaking her head.

“Just keep the crew moving, James. We’ll be dead in the water otherwise, and that won’t do.” her clipped words betray her worry, but Vega has enough insight to acknowledge her order with a firm nod before bringing up comm channels on his omnitool. The faint chatter of familiar voices fills the shuttle with more calm than fear, and Chakwas resumes her examination of the Commander.

Fractured right hand, crushed left leg, dislocated left shoulder under the bloody mess of armour, broken ribs – she could determine enough of these to know he was going to have a long recovery. Even the immediate, reparable damage would leave lingering issues. But those would be temporary, she reminds herself. Shepard has always come back, and she’ll be damned if he doesn’t this time.

“We need to move him to the medbay.” She states simply to the marines waiting just outside, and they file back in to follower her orders on the double.

By the time she steps back out of the shuttle, medkit in hand, the hangar bay goes dark.

_“–ace for emergency landing, repeat: brace for emergency landing! Kinetic barriers holding at forty percent, brace for emergency landing–”_

Joker’s voice fills the bay with static urgency, driving the marines to bellowing orders and locking down the shuttle. Chakwas is ushered in along with them, and Vega jumps in before the shuttle door closes and seals, but his eyes are fixed on the reality of the Commander’s grim situation.

_“Thirty percent–”_

Vega doesn’t know where to look. He tries to find a familiar face but it’s covered in blood and scratches and the wrong kind of red, and he can just see the hard metal plates that hold the left side of his face together, poking through skin. He feels sick to the gut, fingers clenching and unclenching as he ducks his head and assumes the braced position before the crunch of metal and screeching barriers drown out everything else.

_“Ten– for the love of God, if you haven’t already: brace for fucking impact–”_

Silence blankets them, and the chill settles in with it. It’s a callous kind of fear that tugs at Vega’s throat, wills him to try and fill the empty spaces with noise. Something to drive out the fear of the shuttle, and the rattle of Shepard’s breathing. He’d heard that sound so many times before, _too many times_ before now, and it always ended with another grave. Releasing his hold from his braced position, his hands fall limply at his sides, fingers curling around the metal bench.

He’s not sure how long they’d sat in complete darkness until the light of his omnitool flickered and filled the gloom.

_“Vega? You there? ...Lieutenant?”_ His comm crackles, and he takes a moment to answer it – long enough for the shuttle lights to flicker back to life.

“Yeah, Joker, I’m here. What the _hell_ just happened?”

_“Something scrambled us. The Crucible, probably, we had no idea what kind of energy that thing was going to blow out. Guess we figured it out now–”_

“ _Dios_. It blew out half our systems!” James kicks into action, finding his military composure somewhere in the dark. He notices the marines shuffling around, getting the shuttle hatch open to bring Shepard to the medbay with double urgency. James finds a spot against the hatch and pushes with everything he has, the shouts of the marines around him. Eventually, they pry the door open despite the power failure, and they get Shepard out, with Chakwas following close behind. Once they’re all out, he drops the door and it slams shut, the noise reverberating around the hangar.

_“Status?”_ Kaidan’s voice crackles through the comm without warning, but James isn’t blind to the panic in the Major’s voice.

“Power failure across multiple systems, Major.” James delivers simply, gesturing for a couple of marines to hit the backups for the shuttle bay under the maintenance hatch. The Normandy is running silent, and it doesn’t feel right at all. He considers asking for EDI’s input, but some small part of him is beginning to wonder if she even survived that blast herself.

He doesn’t want to ask.

Thankfully, Garrus does.

_“What’s the status with EDI? That pulse fried the entire battery!”_

Joker is unusually quiet. James suspects the worst.

_“Joker, I’m sorry–”_ Kaidan starts, but the pilot is having none of it.

_“Don’t be. I’m not stupid enough to believe that Crucible wasn’t going to blow something to hell, least of all half our tech.”_ Joker’s tone is biting, even over the static of the comm. _“And like hell was I letting anything happen to EDI. We have backups. We can get her online.”_

There's a chill pause in the hangar as death so casually brushes past their shoulders, a nonfunctional AI should have been the least of their worries. But EDI was a part of the crew, and they all knew it. Joker hates the silence even more than his uncertainty, so he pulls them back to order as best as he can.

_“In the meantime, what the shit is going on down in the hangar, Vega? Deck three caught some of the transmission, but we got nothing on the bridge.”_

“We have Shepard.” James feels like he should say something more, but there is nothing else to say. There's no balm, no reassurance for Shepard's return being a good one -- only what he'd seen, and that isn't enough.

_“Say again, Vega?”_

“We have Shepard, we’re taking him to the medbay now.”

_“James, how bad?”_ Kaidan interjects, and James swears down that he can hear what sounds like Ashley’s voice in the background of Kaidan’s comm channel. His heart sinks a little when he recalls the Commander's voice over the comm, calling for a pickup for Ash. Of course she'd be in a state. James almost berates himself for even mentioning it now, but Kaidan's question hangs in the air like a knife, and James has to take it.

“I– shit, I don’t even know. He’s a fucking mess.”

—

Ashley swipes for Kaidan’s arm as James’ voice crackles through the medbay. Her heart is brittle iron for the moment she takes to realise what James is saying, and it shatters to the sound of her fighting with Kaidan for the comm.

“Ash, please–” Kaidan winces as the struggle results in her elbow meeting his bruised rib, and Ashley stops, mouth caught open on an apology, quickly swallowed up in another quiet, gut-wrenching sob. Kaidan feels his own heart sink, dropping his arms to gather Ashley into a tight hug. She shakes against him, hands curled into angry fists at his chest as she tries her hardest not to cry, and damns the fact that she is anyway.

Kaidan fixes his eyes on the door. A part of him wants to take Ash out of the room so she doesn’t have to see him in such a state, but he knows she would never let him. She’s seen worse. She’s just as much of a soldier as Shepard is. Kaidan knows all this in his heart of hearts, but listening to reason is painstakingly difficult when reason demands that your friend gets hurt, and you let it happen anyway.

“I’m _okay_ , Kaidan, you can–” It takes him a moment to realise Ash is pushing her way out of his grip, and he releases her, skin flushed as he apologises. Ash wipes a rough hand across her eyes, swallowing her grief to replace it with her iron will, and she turns to look as the medbay doors slide open once again.


End file.
